Lobotractus mysie (Dyar, 1904)

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Opler, Paul A. & Grishin, Nick V., 2021, Genomics-guided refinement of butterfly taxonomy, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 9 (3), pp. 1-55 : 48

Lobotractus mysie (Dyar, 1904) is a species distinct from Lobotractus valeriana (Plötz, 1881)

Correctly associating then " Codatractus " mysie (Dyar, 1904) with " Codatractus " valeriana (Plötz, 1881) as close relatives by visual inspection of photographs of their primary type specimens, Mielke and Warren

(2004) concluded that " valeriana ... is clearly conspecific with T. mysie ." We sequenced the lectotypes of L. valeriana and L. mysie and found that their COI barcodes differ by 2.1% (14 bp).

Furthermore, the genomic tree of L. valeriana specimens from across the range revealed their partitioning into two clades, each clade with its type specimen: mysie from the US (Fig. 52 purple), and valeriana from various localities in Mexico (Fig. 52 blue). Fst/Gmin statistics for these clades were 0.41/0.04, suggesting that they represent distinct species ( Cong et al. 2019a; Zhang et al. 2020). Therefore, we reinstate Lobotractus mysie (Dyar, 1904) as a species different from Lobotractus valeriana (Plötz, 1881) , and consequently exclude L. valeriana from the US fauna. Curiously, Burns (1996) and (2001) reached similar conclusion as far as the US fauna is concerned, but likely for incorrect reasons.